One of the greatest achievements of free speech laws is that in Germany one can write the truth "soldiers are murderers" on T-shirts
Soldiers in combat can kill without moral injury
61–70 of 81 posts
Re: Soldiers in combat can kill without moral injury
#62That's why the usual strategy is to dehumanized your enemy by calling them some animal names. The Nazis called them rats, the Hutis in Ruanda called them cockroaches, the Russians and Ukrainians both use the same tactics
Re: Soldiers in combat can kill without moral injury
#63The conclusion sounds reasonable and may well be correct. But I’d still be a bit worried about selection effects. The kind of person who signs up for a tour of duty to Afghanistan is probably a bit different than someone who signs up for a UN peacekeeping mission. So an alternative conclusion / title could be: “Moral injury more common among those with high moral standards”.
This was most definitely not the case with my wife. Before Ukraine, she would never have even considered killing another human being. In the war it was very different. Every dead Russian was one step closer to a safe Ukraine.
Talk about your wife some more?
The emotional churn when watching russians throw their lives away in belligerent assaults in flattened cities, mined fields and the like, is difficult to convey; righteous fury I've never felt in another context.
Re: Soldiers in combat can kill without moral injury
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whenever you have these feelings, go watch actual real life combat footage. A great recent one is a knife fight to the death where one soldier admits defeat and asks the first one to leave him to die https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/s/tAUwd2MWqT Watch that and tell me if you think it's still cool and normal life is boring. I find that it snaps me right back out of "Hollywood war" thinking and makes my stomach t…
It’s not about it being cool. It’s about it feeling “normal”. I’m not even sure this is caused by trauma so much as just living a whole other life in a whole other culture with completely different norms, even with combat aside. Going back into the civilian world is a pretty uneasy experience for a lot of veterans. It’s kind of a hard feeling to relay to civilians. A very strong culture shock for even many POGs. I th…
I remember going on leave from right outside Sadr City in 2008ish to a Midwest Walmart a few days later.
A kid there was throwing a tantrum in the isle about his mom not picking the right color toy off the self for him.
It was incredibly jarring for me. At that time events in my life were extremely visceral. If I ate a time or two that day, it was a good day. If I didn't get shot at that day it was a great day. If I didn't get blown up by an IED or RPG, it was an incredible day.
I was eating breakfast one morning and a wild dog had drug the amputated arm from a surgery over from the incinerator that was currently broken, and decided to eat it next to me. The arm still had part of the camouflaged sleeve on it.
The idea of being upset over the color toy your mother was buying you was the most insane thing to me.
Re: Soldiers in combat can kill without moral injury
#65The conclusion sounds reasonable and may well be correct. But I’d still be a bit worried about selection effects. The kind of person who signs up for a tour of duty to Afghanistan is probably a bit different than someone who signs up for a UN peacekeeping mission. So an alternative conclusion / title could be: “Moral injury more common among those with high moral standards”.
Not in my experience.
Did a tour in Afghanistan and Kosovo. Both completely just invasions, IMHO.
Re: Soldiers in combat can kill without moral injury
#66There's a major bias in this study. Many of the people most negatively affected by combat have exactly 0 interest in discussing it, even with those close to them or other veterans. This study observed this bias but seems to have made no effort to go beyond acknowledging it:
---
Combat Study: ... non-responders had more long-term sick leave and social benefits than the survey responders (p ---
Noncombat Study: The responders were significantly older and had significantly lower frequencies of short- and long-term sick leaves, long-term welfare benefits, and sick leave due to mental illness (p ---
It dismissed the need to consider these biases with: "Although the non-responder analysis revealed some response bias, the overall response rate was high in both studies, and the effect size estimates associated with the observed response bias were small." But that seems questionable. The response rate was less than 60% in both studies, and giving an effect size estimate on an unmeasured and "significantly" demographically different population seems to be a textbook example of begging the question.
Re: Soldiers in combat can kill without moral injury
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whenever you have these feelings, go watch actual real life combat footage. A great recent one is a knife fight to the death where one soldier admits defeat and asks the first one to leave him to die https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/s/tAUwd2MWqT Watch that and tell me if you think it's still cool and normal life is boring. I find that it snaps me right back out of "Hollywood war" thinking and makes my stomach t…
A lot of the guys I met in the YPG had seen way more combat than that and still yearned for it. One of them was retired foreign legion that did this as his retirement. When we were getting shot at one of the older guys would get viscerally excited and joyful, and he had seen many dead. Junky is a good description of what they were. They wanted another taste. I can't imagine after 5+ years of that life how you would d…
I think you have to distinguish between militant groups filled with highly motivated ideological volunteers and state militaries which are often primarily filled with people from poor families who have graduated high school and then don't know what to do with their lives. In war time it's an even uglier picture where you may have armies filled with people who were literally dragged kicking and screaming off the streets and then beat into obedience or death.
Re: Soldiers in combat can kill without moral injury
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s not about it being cool. It’s about it feeling “normal”. I’m not even sure this is caused by trauma so much as just living a whole other life in a whole other culture with completely different norms, even with combat aside. Going back into the civilian world is a pretty uneasy experience for a lot of veterans. It’s kind of a hard feeling to relay to civilians. A very strong culture shock for even many POGs. I th…
I remember going on leave from right outside Sadr City in 2008ish to a Midwest Walmart a few days later. A kid there was throwing a tantrum in the isle about his mom not picking the right color toy off the self for him. It was incredibly jarring for me. At that time events in my life were extremely visceral. If I ate a time or two that day, it was a good day. If I didn't get shot at that day it was a great day. If I…
Perspective. I guess that Reddit video mentioned above doesn’t seem so graphic after reading your comment.
I try to rationalize it all by knowing that we, especially westerners, largely live in this seemingly safe facade we like to call “our lives”.
But then, behind the curtain, the raw machinations of life happen to keep the facade going.
The facade is nice. It tricks almost everyone into pacification and thus be less of a threat to us.
On the other hand, the machinations behind the curtain keep churning along. We find it horrifying, but it’s just how things really work underneath the veneer.
The facade is kept up by violence, or the threat thereof. You can’t resist following the facade’s rules (eg. laws and in many cases, human norms) without ultimately being the subject of violence, be it from the state or an angry mob.
It’s best to find peace with that.
Re: Soldiers in combat can kill without moral injury
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you know that? How do you know they don't think both things?
It's certainly not the same revulsion. In the world of men who have not lived their entire lives isolated from danger and conflict in a rules-based society, the Hollywood version of war isn't a consideration. It's no different to Marvel or Harry Potter movies. It's an open secret many people who experience raw conflict in which actions and not regulations decide outcomes like it. It's the reason why they often go bac…
You're making up a bunch of stuff, from the premise about some specific psychologies, to things about the GP, to assumptions about 'Hollywood' and what is the "reality of the world" (it's well-worn sophistry to depict the other person's version as fantasy and your own as reality), to your conclusions.
There's no basis for it. It looks to me, without basis, like the current attempt to spread the fetishization of voilence and war by the same propaganda leaders have used for eternity.
> It's no different to Marvel or Harry Potter movies.
Indeed.
Re: Soldiers in combat can kill without moral injury
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
> People killing people is one of the better-documented aspects of human history. If it's really a commonly-held idea, it's a delusional one. Lots of things are well documented. Famine is too, but it has a big negative impact. Humans are social creatures that live exclusively in groups; they cannot survive alone psychologically or, usually, physically. Groups are effective when they are at peace; evolutionary psychol…
> A universal aspect of every human culture is a taboo against killing. Exactly! It's taboo. It's morally wrong. It's unethical. But does it make it unnatural? It's taboo to talk about sex and what you do on the toilet, two of the most natural and human things there are.
You’re conflating social taboos with societal taboos.